How Can Budgeting Help You With Retirement Planning

episode

Previously titled “Ep 117 | How Can Budgeting Help You With Retirement Planning” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026

Wealthy After 40: Retirement Planning and Budgeting for Gen X 18 min 2 speakers 4 chapters transcribed 1 month ago
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Why is budgeting essential to a successful retirement plan?

Dalene (Dalene Higgins) 0:00
Why is budgeting essential to your retirement plan? Budgeting isn't about the plan or staying on track. It's about the result you want. Listen to this episode to understand how to find power in budgeting and how that power can help you retire. Welcome to Wealthy After 40, where I help you turn retirement uncertainty into a clear, actionable plan. If you're thinking about retirement but feel unsure whether it's even possible, I understand. The gap between where you are now and where you want to be can feel overwhelming, but it doesn't have to. Hi, I'm Daylene Higgins, founder of Elevate Finances and your personal financial coach. Having retired at the age of 50 and have enjoyed over two years of retirement bliss, I'm here to help you create your retirement dream and make it a reality.
Dalene (Dalene Higgins) 1:04
No more wondering, no more guessing, just taking action and building a future for yourself. Join me each week as I guide you through essential topics such as budgeting, cash flow, lifestyle planning, debt and savings, insurance, Medicare, and social security. Together, we'll build a strategy to help you achieve the retirement you've always desired. It's time to shift from uncertain to unstoppable and make your retirement dreams a reality. Welcome to today's episode. I'm so excited to talk about budgeting and why budgeting is essential to your retirement plan. About a month ago, I was just thinking about all of the things I teach, all of the things I believe. And I had this thought about budgeting because I believe there is so much power in budgeting.
Dalene (Dalene Higgins) 2:04
And I'm going to share that with you in this episode. But my thought about it was realizing that budgeting isn't about the plan or staying on track. It's about the end result. Now, thinking about many individuals who I've talked to, why they get off budgeting, it's really the tracking that they do. But I know one client said, I create a budget, and then by the middle of the month, it's just gone. I just go off the rails. It doesn't even look like what I'm spending. And Thinking about that the budget isn't about the plan or staying on track. That really comes with a scarcity mindset and keeping yourself in control. Especially if you're like, well, I need to budget my money this month. This is where I'm spending it.
Dalene (Dalene Higgins) 2:55
Now I need to stay in control. That is not motivating. There is no reason why you should budget. I get why you are just throwing the budget away. What if you approach it differently? If you approach it by thinking about what do I want the end result to be? Yes, this can be a goal. This can be desires that you want to have happen with your money. But really the end result, and it's not the end of the end, but it's where you want to go with, how you want to feel even. Do you want to be less stressed? What does that mean?

How can reframing budgeting from restriction to outcome change your behavior?

Dalene (Dalene Higgins) 3:34
And defining those specifics about why you're budgeting can help you be a much better budgeter. If you've just been budgeting to budget your money and stay in control, that kind of sits in that scarcity mindset. Think about budgeting as the framework that gives you power over your money to achieve what you want. To explain this just a little bit better, if you have been listening for a while and if you are a newsletter subscriber of mine, you know I've been working on my health journey for a while, a lot. But in a coaching call the other day with my online fitness instructor, she talked about nutrition has to be in the driver's seat if you want to lose weight. It always comes down to that. We want it to be something else.
Dalene (Dalene Higgins) 4:38
The budget also needs to be in the driver's seat. Just like you can't out-exercise a bad diet, you can't control spending without a budget. Actually, let's rephrase that. You can't create a dream, a desire, you can't reach there without a budget. We need to think about budget as being a framework. This is how much money I have monthly. We don't have any more than that. Here are my needs. Here are my desires. And that is what equates to a budget. Within your needs, you have your bills, your food, all of the basics.

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